Tag: narrative

Rarely will you come across a video game that so earnestly portrays mental illness, in this case mainly schizophrenia, and how this condition can shape or reshape a person’s perception of reality. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice tells the story of Senua and her journey through her own hellish reality. It is a story that in 2017 needed to be told via the video game medium.

Ladykiller in a Bind, created by Christine Love,is what many would probably call an interactive visual novel. However, I argue that it should still be considered a video game, and not considering experiences such as this one video games would be a loss to the game community and the media’s otherwise diverse possibilities of expression.

When we think of stories, we could mention at least a dozen different categories within which we classify our stories, and multiple ways of construction; i.e. short stories, novels, graphic novels, journals, etc. And those were just written examples. There is also audio-visual storytelling, theatre, and many more. Not least, video games. Naturally, I shall be talking about video games.

One of the great challenges when designing video games is not merely to design a game that is interesting and fun for the first one or two hours of play, since this is helped along massively by the novelty of the game, the world, the story, etc. Novelty drives much of the excitement and curiosity. But what then when this extends into 10+ hours of play? What happens when the novelty wears off? That is where a game must truly prove its mettle.